Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women - Wise Acres Yearbook (Ambler, PA)

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School of Horticulture Their soft gray stone work standing out against the bright blue sky and the cooing pigeons swooping down from the gateways and alighting on the edge of the pool were inspirations. They gave life to the garden. The soft sound of the splash of the fountain and the light and shadow at play on the ruined walls combined to give a feeling of harmony, a sense of repose. And perhaps most alluring of all was the vista from the very end of the garden, looking down past the pool and fountain, past the first gateway, past the second gateway out to the cobbled street in which two or three kerchiefed peasants might be chatting and still further to the narrowing treedined road leading to Compicgne. The actual work of the garden began by the making of a compost of soil and manure for the roses. This procedure met with intense appreciation as the French peasant reveres good soil. He is a natural savant in all matters pertaining to the land. To see him at the humble task of spading is an education. I left the soil from July to November turning it once. It repaid my trouble and expense. My next procedure was to visit a nursery to select the ornamental trees and roses I required. The remaining plants were sent from near Orleans. The nursery which was recommended to me as specializing in clipped yews and boxwood was Moser Fils, at Versailles. I spent an intensely interesting morning going over their nursery. Their topiary work was very fanciful indeed. Among other objects I saw a life-size windmill, an aeroplane, and a Temple of Love, all made out of yew. There seemed miles of conical yews and acres of balls of box. Beside the usual run of nursery stock they had a very artistically planned show garden for roses. I was wishing to buy roses, Hybrid Teas in the rose'salmon'yellow shades. My “vendeur very gallantly picked a number of blooms for me, imprinting a figure on the petal of each rose with the pencil. I thought this a unique method of labelling varieties! I found Pernet roses very much in favor both in England and France. The follow' ing were among some of the varieties recommended to me: Souvenir de Claudius Pernet, Souvenir de Georges Pernet, Mme. Edouard Her-riot, Louise Katherine Breslau, Betty Uprichard, George Beckwith, Reins, Lady Hillingdon, Sunstar, Queen Alexandra, Golden Ophelia, Los Angeles. The Viola I used for a carpet was La Parisienne, a rich warm purple. On my French trellis 1 planted the same variety of climbing Hybrid Tea roses intermingled with large'flowered, purple clematis in varied tones. Outside of roses, clematis, wistaria, honeysuckle and ivy, I found it difficult to get climbers. I found Bignonia radicans and Polygonum baldschuanicum made an attractive combination either falling over a wall or climbing up one where staples can be driven in, or other support given. A little Virginia Creeper as well, adds a note of color in the fall. Small rock plants called forth quite a hunt as they are too inconspicuous to be very popular. Again over ground covers I met with obstacles. Ivy kept recurring, alternating with Japanese honeysuckle. Euonymus radicans seemed little liked, or certainly little used, and Pachysandra was quite an outsider, though perhaps for' tunately so. In very few instances are green coverings encouraged on stone work of any kind. In comparison to American gardens, this seems to suggest a certain bareness. Bulbs of all kinds are popular. Most of them are imported from Hob land, and as the exchange this year was very high, I bought as few as possible, con' sequently another year my perennial border must have many more Darwin tulips added to it and I wish to see the moat a sheet of yellow Narcissi blooms. T hirtyone

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W ise-oA cres qA ‘Different Objective Beatrice Williams BATTLEFIELDS —the word has become almost a distant echo. Yet last July, as the train left the Gare du Nord it seemed but yesterday that I had taken my departure from this same Paris to see for the first time the Devastated Regions of Northern France. It was in reality over seven years ago. I was going as an agricultural worker to one of the units of the American Committee for Devastated France. This time my mission was a less vital one. I was going to look at the garden site at the Chateau of Blerancourt. Arrived in the village where the American Committee had had its headquarters in the days when I knew it, how changed everything seemed. An air of tranquillity had settled over everything—there was no longer that breathless activity which ensued just after the War, when desperate efforts were being made to raise some' thing—just any kind of shelter out of the ruins. Ruins there still were but they had become accepted facts. The town was of historic interest long before the last war on account of the great beauty of its seventeenth century Chateau. At the time of the French Revolu' lion, the Chateau was destroyed almost in its entirety. All that remains of it are its two massive stone carved portals, one at the entrance to the domaine, the other at the entrance to the Chateau proper, across the moat, into which the porte cullis was fastened; two similarly carved stone pavilions, one on either side of the second gateway and at each extremity of the ramparts which rise from the moat to form the foundation of the ancient Chateau. These remains are listed with the Beaux Arts as “Monument Historique . The pavilions were seriously damaged in the last war. They were restored by the American Committee and given with the adjoining land to the Commune of Blerancourt, to be used as a public garden on the condition that one of the pavilions be kept as a Museum and the other as a Guest House. Behind the pavilions on the emplacement of the original Chateau, some of the walls of which are still standing, the site was chosen for the Memorial Garden. The beginnings of this Garden had already been made. Little, however, could be said to be growing, owing to the depleted condition of the soil, and to the quantity of war debris still unremoved. The reconstruction of this garden was then to be an all absorbing occupation for two coming months. I was to revamp my French to affect a gardening vocabulary. Evenings were to be spent in tortuous calculations in metres and centimetres, and an international search of nursery cata logues was to ensue tracking down international favourites. To do the actual planting, I was to have two French gardeners. They are perhaps more meticulously trained than gardeners of any other nation, owing possibly to the demands made bv the universal French Style which is classical. These gardeners are painstaking almost to a fault. There is, in their method of planting, no flexibility. A sense of balance and an eye for a straight line and square corners is innate in any everyday gardener. The ceremony used in the planting of boxwood could not be outdone. They like to plant by a metre stick and they prefer parterres to perennial borders. Irregularity they abhor. The removing of the old soil and the bringing of the new was all done by con-tract so that I had only to sec that my plan was correctly executed. The Garden setting was ideal. The pavilions, the imposing gateways, designed and carved in the time of Louis XIV, might have been a little piece of Versailles. Thirty

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W ise-oA cres When I left my garden in March, almost entirely completed, it was with the mingled feeling of satisfaction and sadness. Satisfaction that the natural charm had, I believe, been enhanced, and the soil I knew to be greatly enriched, so that after June the setting for the pavilions would be a glory. My thoughts leaped for ward twenty years or more to the time when the wistaria would be a large, trunked vine with its pendulous mauve blooms overhanging the arches of the bridge; to the time when the little Wellingtonians would be sentinels once more in the Chateau grounds, replacing the shrapnel'pitted and shelbtorn trees we had removed, and the limes would have formed a second generation of pleached allee, a characteristic of French chateau. My sadness then was purely selfish—a pang of regret at leaving a second time this corner of France and its lovable people. The CPast Musically murmuring. Rhythmically low, Breaks a surf of memory On the Long Ago. Faint, our quivering spirit lies Prone upon the sand As the DreanvTide softly sighs O'er the magic strand. Soaring hopes and cherished things In the strain are borne. Paeans that our yearning sings In life's rosy morn. Memories with Time endear Wraiths of vanished days, As in autumn, scenes appear Wreathed in purple haze, And the Past, relentless, takes Toll of joy and woe, While the surf of memory breaks On the Long Ago. George B. Kaiser Thirtytwo